Love and Loyalty

It seems there's nothing I know how to say
To you so you can fully understand
How true my love and loyalty shall stay.

I try to speak, and yet you look so gray --
A cloud has darkened all your fertile land --
It seems there's nothing I know how to say.

And yet I cannot seem to bring the day
With syllables -- should I sign with my hand
How true my love and loyalty shall stay?

The rain is streaming down -- we can't delay --
Although the flood is making its demand,
It seems there's nothing I know how to say.

I feel I'm without keel and washed away --
I yell and hope you hear across the sand
How true my love and loyalty shall stay.

It seems what I can say will not betray
My feelings for you, even words I've planned --
It seems there's nothing I know how to say
How true my love and loyalty shall stay.

Time

We waste time, spend time, fill and pass the time
We’re trapped in all its waves and ebbs and flows –
We’re caught up in its rhythms and its rhyme.

We treat time like it doesn’t cost a dime
When we’re in debt to it. Lord only knows
We waste time, spend time, fill and pass the time.

Our minds and bodies are set to its chime,
Connected more to poetry than prose:
We’re caught up in its rhythms and its rhyme.

We think we can control it, then we mime
All that has come before: it’s all a pose –
We waste time, spend time, fill and pass the time.

When will we learn to use it as a prime
And natural source of life, which always shows
We’re caught up in its rhythms and its rhyme?

We’re monkeys in the tree of time and climb
The limbs, the places where each of us grows.
We waste time, spend time, fill and pass the time –
We’re caught up in its rhythms and its rhyme.

The Villanelle

All art springs from the fear that we’ll be dead
And no one will remember. We were here –
A verse that haunts, and echoes in your head.

And as each stares through darkness in his bed
The shifting drapes just amplify his fear
All art springs from the fear that we’ll be dead.

But sex and life, they make existence red
And joyous bright and surely nowhere near
A verse that haunts and echoes in your head.

But sex and life require death, embed
Themselves with him. Their dancing makes it clear
All art springs from the fear that we’ll be dead.

These thoughts, they are the artist’s wine and bread,
The darkness feeds him the one thing that’s dear:
A verse that haunts and echoes in your head.

The poet writes all that he wished he’d said
To whom he loves and who he’ll always hear:
All art springs from the fear that we’ll be dead,
A verse that haunts, and echoes in your head.